Once again the voice or reason. She might do better in both if she dropped out of school. Not a good choice, but it would leave her more time to train.

The idiot coach suggesting specialization is an instantiation of the zillion idiot coaches out there pushing specialization. The main thing is that kids/teens stay in sport as long as possible. Actual athlete achievement is nearly meaningless, because almost no one earns a living through the sport they are doing to feed their families.

What the kids learn in sport, they will one day apply in their professional lives outside sport.

I coached youth XC skiing for 14 years and really encouraged the kids to diversify in other sport of all kinds and make different neural connections and become "body smarter". One year at the year end banquet, when they asked me to speak to the kids and parents I asked the parents:

"What is the most important thing that you think your kids learned this ski race season".

This is what I got,

"They improved their one skate and technique"
"They improved their hill climbing and dealing with pain"
"They learned out to glide longer per stride"
"They really pushed their intervals"
"They learned how to deal with the pressure of race day"
"They learned how to pace their races"
"They learned how to keep the pressure on while the heat was on from the competition"

Finally, I stopped them and said, "See all your answers.....I just used skiing as a tool to apply this process to life in the professional world. When they grow up, they will work on their craft, they will push themselves, they will deal with pressure when the stakes are high, they will learn to pace themselves out, they will learn to outlast the competition in a competitive world. This is what your kids learned this year. Skiing was just a tool for me to get them there. They were having so much fun skiing, that they did not even realize that I was driving into them a process to apply for life"

In closing I said, "It kind of sucks that none of my coaches when I was kid told me that they were giving me a gift for life. Rather, I only figured this out at the age of 40 after working for 18 years and finally realizing that I had a huge advantage in the tech world because of my sports background. So this is what I was coaching your kids for"

In any case, that's my angle on youth coaching.

Dev

I am 100% in agreement with your perspective on youth coaching and the benefits realized from participation in youth athletics.

Well said, Dev.


While an easy 1K warm-up helps loosen things up, the power generated by a good wall push is significant, and repeated every 25y in a SCY pool. As a teenage swimmer, I ran for fun, and got pretty good. Later, as a USAT AA triathlete with a “running weakness,” my fastest 10K Run splits came that year that I swam with the former D1 Masters... and no workout was ever recovery or a long steady swim.

Interesting you mention that the swims are never "Long/easy". Literally this is what runners do. Coming from a run background, I never understood how swimmers could be doing intervals on every swim....until I became a swimmer and now I would say I do 10x the amount of aggregate cardio intensity compared to my running days...so I agree with what you guys are saying completely. I would strongly encourage the OP to keep his daughter in both sports....swim for the technical and cardio, run for land legs and other neural connections that come with running that you can't get with swimming. I would say this combo is best of all worlds. If I had my choice, I think the better mix would be swim + soccer or swim + tennis....then you are running in all dimensions and there are projectiles involved for eye-body coordination, plus a combo of fast twitch - slow twitch exercise.